I was talking with one of my coworkers back when we hit -30. It’s her first winter too. She came up from Idaho to live with her sister. When I asked if she had gotten her vehicle winterized she said not yet and told me the most ridiculous thing. Her dad has a friend who runs a car dealership. They often went to him for a friends and family discount. She asked him about winterizing her car since her sister had told her how important it can be up here. He looked into it and came back to tell her he thought it was a complete scam and he recommended against it.

If winterization is a scam, the entire state has been bamboozled!

Almost every car you see will have a plug hanging out of the grill somewhere. Some people even keep their cold weather extension cord wound up on the front of the vehicle. Every workplace, school, apartment building, and hotel has plugins for each parking space. I have had guests wonder what the plug is all about, assuming that we have a lot of electric cars up here. We don’t. This just powers the heating pads that get installed on the batteries, engine block, oil pan, and transmission pan.

If the temperature gets colder than about -10° the oil thickens up. One ad on the radio compared it to sucking honey through a straw. It can’t flow enough to protect the engine so the engine can run to heat up. The batteries can freeze and lose power, sometimes permanently. If you can’t warm up the vehicle enough to start then you just have to wait for warmer temps, whenever those might come along.

Blue hasn’t started for two days. I have gotten Chris to drive me to work in the Scone, but he now wants me to drive myself. The ridiculous thing is that I bought the car with a manual transmission and let him learn to drive it in the snow but I’m afraid to do it myself. Yeah, my anxiety is showing there. I’m going to leave Blue plugged in until 8:30 and see what happens. If it’s a no-start I’ll have to suck it up and drive the car. Such is my life.